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[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jo Bartosch

Published: Apr 21, 2024

How did people emerge from the hysteria of the witch trials? What must it have felt like to live through the period when supposed witches were suddenly revealed to be ordinary women? What did the accusers say when it became clear that these supposed agents of Satan were simply adult human females? Did they feel guilt and try to make amends? Did they shirk their responsibility? Or did they double down?

The reactions to the publication of the Cass Review last week might give us some idea. The activists, medical professionals and celebrities who championed the trans cause have been confronted with the horror they helped create. Dr Hilary Cass’s report into the NHS’s treatment of gender-confused kids has radically transformed the trans debate, exposing ‘gender-affirming care’ as a dangerous experiment. Now, the disciples of trans ideology are scrambling to save face.

The most common reaction from cheerleaders of trans ideology has been to meekly plead ignorance. One such case is that of Dr Adam Rutherford, geneticist, science communicator and president of Humanists UK – an organisation that in recent years has made a hard turn away from science and rationality in favour of worshipping the cult of gender identity. Yet when he was invited to comment on the Cass Review by Sex Matters director Maya Forstater on X, Rutherford said: ‘It’s not something I know much about.’ Really? It’s somewhat difficult to believe that Rutherford has somehow missed seeing this bit of hugely significant medical news.

This is mirrored by the bleating entreaties for ‘nuance’ from television presenter Kirstie Allsopp. For the past few years, Allsopp has smeared gender-critical views as transphobic. Now she is attempting to rewrite history by claiming that it has always ‘been possible to debate these things and those saying there was no debate are wrong’. We all know this isn’t true. As JK Rowling correctly points out, ‘one of the gender ideologues’ favourite slogans is “no debate”’.

Perhaps the most egregious response of all has come from former Stonewall CEO Baroness Ruth Hunt. It was Hunt who oversaw the charity’s transformation from a gay-rights charity to an LGBT lobby group, with the emphasis firmly on the T. It was under her watch that Stonewall tried to silence warnings about the dangers of experimental puberty blockers. Yet last week, Hunt told The Times that she had simply ‘trusted the experts’ on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, so she couldn’t possibly be held accountable. Given that Stonewall itself was deferred to as an ‘expert’ organisation on the issue of gender-affirming care, it is hard to accept Hunt’s projection of innocence. She was hardly some misled ingénue.

Even more deranged and delusional are those who have dismissed the Cass Review as ‘unscientific’. Apparently, Cass’s four years of research and the reams of data she gathered are simply a pretext for promoting a ‘transphobic’ narrative. This rejection of reason is perhaps most eloquently demonstrated by the hyperbolic hashtag, #CassKillsKids, which has been tweeted out by the likes of broadcaster and trans activist India Willoughby. But this position is so patently untrue that only a small minority of the most committed zealots seem to be defending it.

The fact is, it is incredibly difficult for trans activists to obscure their roles in this scandal. Many of them must now be aware that they cheered on a gruesome, ideologically motivated experiment on children. After all, the facts are now indisputable.

In measured tones and meticulous detail, Cass’s report reveals what was really going on inside the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). She concludes that the ‘gender affirming’ medical treatments it provided, like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, are based on ‘wholly inadequate’ evidence. Doctors are usually cautious when adopting new treatments, but Cass says ‘quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children’. Instead, thousands of children were put on an unproven medical pathway. Worse still, medical professionals seemed largely uninterested in uncovering the side effects and long-term risks of these drugs. Cass says that all but one adult gender clinic refused to share patient data that would allow her team to study how childhood transitioners fared as adults. This made it virtually impossible to research the potential longer-term consequences of transitioning.

The implications of the review are so grave that politicians have had no choice but to act. On Monday, health secretary Victoria Atkins gave an excoriating speech to parliament, laying out the changes in policy that have already been made and those still to come. She reiterated that NHS England would no longer be able to prescribe puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria outside of clinical trials. She also promised a crackdown on private prescriptions, as well as an urgent review on clinical policy for prescribing cross-sex hormones. Vitally, she also announced that NHS trusts that initially refused to cooperate with the review will now share their data, hopefully opening the door for further research. These developments were all sorely needed.

Atkins also made a point of thanking the clinicians, academics, activists and journalists who raised the alarm. She acknowledged that they had ‘risked their careers’ to do so. She told her fellow politicians that it should trouble each of them that the NHS ‘was overtaken by a culture of secrecy and ideology that was allowed to trump evidence and safety’.

Finally, politicians are taking these concerns seriously. Until very recently, they did not want to know. Back in May 2019, I was one of a handful of people to attend the First Do No Harm meeting at the House of Lords. There, in a tiny cramped room, we listened to clinicians and campaigners who were desperately worried about the goings on in the GIDS Tavistock clinic in London.

First Do No Harm was organised by campaigner Venice Allan and Let Women Speak founder Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker), with the aim of bringing together journalists, politicians and medical experts. It was chaired and spon.sored by Labour peer Lord Lewis Moonie, who himself had a background in psychology and clinical pharmacological research. Among the attendees was psychoanalyst Marcus Evans. He had resigned from his post as a governor at the Tavistock clinic in February that year, citing concerns about the influence of lobby groups on clinical practice.

Despite this wealth of knowledge and expertise, First Do No Harm went largely ignored by politicians. Invitations were sent out to every member of parliament. But, aside from Moonie, the only politicians in attendance were Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson and Conservative MP David Davies. As Evans explained at the time: ‘No one would basically attend, they’d be threatened that they would have the whip withdrawn if they attended… the silencing of opposition in this area is unbelievable.’

There was certainly a cost for Moonie. After over 40 years in the Labour Party, he was told by party general secretary Jenny Formby that his membership would be at risk if he proceeded with the event. So he resigned. Five years on, and the concerns of Moonie, a small band of whistleblowing clinicians and tenacious campaigners have finally been acknowledged.

While First Do No Harm was the first public meeting bringing concerned voices together, staff within GIDS had already been sounding the alarm for some time. It was all the way back in 2004 that Susan Evans, wife of Marcus, first spoke out about the ‘precipitous referral’ of gender-confused children on to a medical pathway. As a clinical nurse at the Tavistock, she tried to raise the possibility that there were alternatives to medically transitioning children. But she was advised that GIDS would be unable to attract patients without offering puberty blockers. Evans resigned in 2007.

Today, Evans tells me that, while she is relieved about the findings of the Cass Review, she is frustrated to see ‘what happened at GIDS described as a debate between two sides’:

‘I wanted to ensure that kids were receiving a thorough assessment and that as a team there would be a more holistic exploration… That’s not a toxic debate, that is clinical discussion and that’s what a responsible clinician ought to do. All I ever did was raise ordinary but important clinical and safeguarding concerns and questions. I was inquisitive.’

Thankfully, there were still some other inquisitive clinicians out there. In 2018, Dr David Bell, consultant psychiatrist and staff governor at the Tavistock, wrote an internal report that slammed GIDS for promoting a model of uncritical gender affirmation. He blamed trans lobby groups like Mermaids and Stonewall for infecting the organisation. He also explained that many of the young patients seeking to medically transition would otherwise grow up to be lesbian, gay or bisexual. For this, senior management at GIDS threatened Bell with disciplinary action, in an attempt to silence him.

Shortly afterwards, in 2019, clinical psychologist Kirsty Entwistle, who had previously worked at the GIDS satellite clinic in Leeds, penned an open letter, echoing similar concerns. She warned that patients were falsely being told that puberty blockers were ‘fully reversible’ and that accusations of transphobia were stifling important medical and safeguarding discussions.

GIDS was desperate to silence anyone who expressed doubts about how clinics were operating. One such whistleblower was Sonia Appleby, who was a social worker and safeguarding lead at the Tavistock. In 2016, Appleby began to raise concerns about the shambolic record-keeping and the potential over-prescription of puberty blockers. For this, she was bullied and monstered by management, and shunned by GIDS director Dr Polly Carmichael. Carmichael apparently told her team that Appleby had ‘an agenda’ and discouraged staff from sharing any safeguarding concerns with her. In a small act of justice, in 2021 Appleby was awarded £20,000 in damages for the appalling way she was treated at the Tavistock.

Many of the stories from those who spoke out chime with one another. They talk about being alarmed that children’s underlying issues were being systematically overlooked. GIDS was more interested in prescribing medical treatments than in helping children who were suffering from homophobic bullying, mental-health issues, sexual abuse or other traumas. When questions were asked about the safety of puberty blockers and hormones, staff faced an atmosphere where clinical curiosity was discouraged. In all, between 2016 and 2019, a total of 35 clinicians left the Tavistock, with many citing concerns about children being over-diagnosed. Meanwhile, management ignored all these concerns and children continued to be prescribed puberty blockers.

It was shortly after Carmichael’s appointment in 2011 that GIDS began its first trial of puberty blockers. Before the research had even concluded, these drugs, which have also been used to chemically castrate sex offenders, were made more widely available to children. In 2014, the minimum prescription age was dropped from 16 to 11. Some private clinics even started prescribing them to children as young as nine.

GIDS management, it seemed, was remarkably unbothered by the lack of evidence for puberty blockers. In 2016, Carmichael told a World Professional Association for Transgender Health conference in Amsterdam that they were crucial for trans-identified kids and ‘incredibly successful’. But in the same speech, she admitted that ‘actually, the Dutch are the only team really who have published long-term perspective studies about this. So there is very little data available.’ Indeed, as Carmichael admits, virtually the only bit of evidence ever referenced in support of puberty blockers is a piece of flawed research from the Netherlands. It was later revealed that the findings from GIDS’s own puberty-blocker trial were far from reliable.

It was left to those on the outside to bring public attention to what was happening at GIDS. Yet, just as with the silencing of clinicians, those outside the medical profession were also smeared as transphobic for questioning the new wisdom about so-called trans kids.

One of the earliest groups to demand an evidence-based approach was Transgender Trend, which was founded by Stephanie Davies-Arai in 2015. She and her organisation were almost instantly hounded and derided by trans extremists. A children’s book published by Transgender Trend was even compared to ‘terrorist propaganda’. But this smear campaign wouldn’t stop the truth from being revealed. Transgender Trend soon attracted the attention of Oxford professor Michael Biggs. In 2019, he published a report with the organisation, showing that the use of puberty blockers did not reduce the mental distress experienced by patients – a conclusion now backed up by Cass.

This reality became impossible to ignore, especially as ‘detransitioners’ began to speak out. The existence of people who regretted their decision to transition proved to be a thorn in the side of the trans movement and a powerful testimony against so-called trans healthcare. In November 2019, a women’s rights group called Make More Noise hosted the first panel discussion of detransitioners in the UK, giving them an opportunity to share their stories with journalists. With testosterone-cracked voices and mastectomy scars, these young women embody the harms of gender medicine. They were the ‘data’ that the clinicians at GIDS had overlooked.

Detransitioners fought to make themselves heard. In 2020, a high-profile legal challenge by detransitioner Keira Bell against the Tavistock prompted NHS England to commission the Cass Review. Leading paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass was then tasked with finding out what was really happening at GIDS.

Detransitioner Sinead Watson, who, as a young adult, took medical steps to present as male, is one of those who gave evidence to the Cass Review researchers. She tells me: ‘They asked about my story, how I was evaluated, how quickly, about the side effects of [testosterone] and about the surgery. They asked how I was helped to deal with the regret when I sought out support from the NHS, and seemed genuinely surprised I had received no help.’

It truly is a scandal that children and youngsters were put on a pathway to medicalisation and then promptly abandoned. There are now calls for a public inquiry, and it looks like adult services will also now face their own Cass-style review. But the problem with the trans ideology is that it extends far beyond medicine. It is a mind virus that has infected almost every British institution.

Certainly, there can never be true justice for detransitioners. They will continue to carry the mistakes of the medical establishment, and the failure of the government, on their bodies. It also seems unlikely that any of the whistleblowers who were vilified for raising the alarm will receive apologies or retractions. Trans cheerleaders will continue to deny any complicity. No doubt the GIDS management and healthcare professionals who tried to suppress the truth will be able to slink off to lucrative careers elsewhere.

Still, the Cass Review has revealed that the witches were right. Its publication ought to mark a historical turning point, and serve as a reminder that truth can win out. We must remember all this when the next hysterical mania sweeps over society.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Literally what's happened to Disney-Marvel, Disney-Star Wars, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings and major video game publishers.

They've pandered to activists to produce for a "modern audience" that doesn't exist, and alienated the audience that does exist. Instead of taking responsibility for their own actions and choices, they then attack the audience for their lack of interest.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Mia Hughes

Published: Feb 8, 2024

A thread about social contagions:

In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next 7 years, he saw a further 30 women presenting with the same condition.

In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa. The condition was included in the DSM-III the following year. Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women.

The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls 'semantic contagion' - how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this way.

Bulimia entered the lexicon via women's magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media's culpability in the spread of social contagions.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion. A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of a social contagion.

Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010, and then, all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialised world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender.

It was the perfect storm. In the 2010s, the media fascination with transgenderism began with 'Caitlyn' Jenner and I Am Jazz; the political left became infatuated with trans rights, and schools started teaching gender ideology to children as young as kindergarten.

Social media came on the scene and provided the perfect super-spreading environment. Teenage girls are now just one click away from 1000s of TikTok and YouTube videos of young women proudly showing off their mastectomy scars and extolling the joy of taking testosterone.

Just as this new, atypical type of gender dysphoria was emerging, gender clinics, at the behest of activist groups, abandoned the psychotherapeutic approach of watchful waiting and adopted the affirmative model - fast-tracking these teens to irreversible medical procedures.

We're in the eye of the storm right now, so most people can't see the damage being done. But soon, all the young people emerging from this contagion sterile and missing body parts will be visible for all to see, and people will be horrified that they supported such evil.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Terrorism supporters have gotten so bold they're openly declaring their support for the Hamas terrorist organization and their approval of the October 7 massacre.

This is why we need free speech. So we know who our enemies are and what they intend to do.

Believe them when they tell you what they're up to.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The biggest study ever on the pay gap, I think it was done by Harvard, basically looked at Uber drivers in America. The big reason it's the biggest is because they had so much data. Uber obviously has so much data, and men and women both drive Ubers in America.

They looked at the paying and they were like, "well, women are getting paid less at Uber. How does that make sense? Because it's obviously all automated." What a great way of studying the male and female behavior to work out what is in this gap.

And there's three things in the gap.

The first was men drove at different times at night. Some men would do the graveyard shifts, early mornings where you get paid more. They would want to do that. Women less so.

Second was that men were more likely to stick with the platform for longer, so they had more experiences, and they benefit from that experience. Makes sense of any job.

And the third reason, which is 50% of the gap, was that men just drive faster.

Just drive a little faster, guys, then you'll close that gap.

That's so funny.

That shows that it wasn't discrimination that's causing the pay gap in Uber. It was just...

Heavy right foot.

Different types of behavior. And I guess we can have a discussion of what shapes that behavior, but we need to start that conversation with it's not discrimination, at least in Uber, it's different types of behavior.

==

If your response is, "yeah, but that's just Uber," you need to be relentlessly mocked and ridiculed for being unserious.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

More absolute insanity out of @Columbia tonight. “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!” “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!” “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!” “Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’ fight!” “It is right to rebel, Al-Qassam, give them hell!” “It is right to rebel, Hamas give them hell!” “Free, free, free Palestine!” Jihadists are openly chanting for terrorism on the streets of New York.

You can officially stop pretending that "pro-Palestine" doesn't mean pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism and pro-Jihad. We can see for ourselves.

This is the rise of Islamic Naziism.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Camilla Turner

Published: Apr 20, 2024

A public inquiry must be set up to examine the “pervasive influence” of transgender ideology in schools and the NHS, the Prime Minister has been told.

The treatment of “confused and vulnerable” children by medical professionals has been a “major scandal”, according to a group of more than 130 MPs, peers, doctors, psychiatrists and academics.

Kemi Badenoch, the women and equalities minister, is understood to back the calls for a public inquiry.

“In the wake of the Cass review, she feels that people need to be held to account,” a source close to Mrs Badenoch said. “She is particularly appalled by the fact that a lot of NHS clinicians refused to share data and refused to co-operate.”

The calls for a public inquiry come after a report by Dr Hillary Cass, a leading paediatrician, which found that the evidence for allowing children and young people to change gender is built on “shaky foundations”.

The landmark review said that social transitioning should be approached with “extreme caution” because “we simply do not know the long-term impacts”.

Dr Cass revealed that her research was hampered by the fact that adult gender clinics refused to disclose whether transgender people who started their treatment as children later changed their minds about transitioning, or went on to suffer serious mental health problems.

Following its publication, Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, met Amanda Pritchard, the chief executive of NHS England, to tell her “nothing less than full co-operation by those clinics in the research is acceptable”.

Public inquiries can be given special powers to compel testimony and the release of other forms of evidence. This means that if such an inquiry was set up, adult gender clinics could be forced to hand over data on their patients

In the letter to Rishi Sunak, the group of signatories said they were “gravely concerned” about the physical and emotional harm caused to children “in the name of gender identity ideology”.

They noted that some schools “teach gender identity ideology to pupils as if it were fact, often to the exclusion or denial of biological reality” and that medical interventions on transgender children “have been revealed as a major medical scandal”.

Signatories include Liz Truss, the former prime minister; Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a former minister; Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger, the leaders of the New Conservatives group of MPs; and 14 other MPs and peers from across the political spectrum.

Tavistock deemed ‘not safe’

Another signatory is Marcus Evans, a consultant psychotherapist and former governor turned whistleblower of the Tavistock clinic, which was the country’s flagship NHS gender identity service for children until it was shut down after it was deemed “not safe” for youngsters.

Dozens of consultant psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, GPs, lawyers and academics are also among the signatories.

The letter explains: “Encouraging confused and vulnerable children to transition, socially or medically, including with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, has caused irreversible developmental issues, physiological damage (such as loss of bone density, infertility and sexual dysfunction) and significant social and relational harms.

“This has already had a direct and lifelong impact on child development, the true extent of which is not yet known.

“We believe this is a major scandal that requires a public inquiry. This should consider the extent to which state and non-state institutions have failed in their duty of care by supporting, encouraging or facilitating a model of ‘gender-affirming transition’ towards children who believe they are transgender.”

Inquiry ‘should examine all institutions’

The letter, co-ordinated by social campaigner James Esses, goes on to suggest that a public inquiry should examine “all institutions complicit in this harm”, including government departments, the NHS, private gender clinics, mental health bodies, schools and transgender campaign groups.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Mr Esses said: “Society is, slowly but surely, beginning to wake up to the horrors caused in the name of gender ideology.

“Children and young people have been left scarred, emotionally and physically, in the name of gender ideology. Some have been left infertile. Others have lost parts of their bodies that they can never get back.

“As a society, we have failed in our duty of care towards children. We must secure justice for those who have been harmed. Crucially, we must ensure that no child again suffers the same fate.”

[ Via: https://archive.today/Vx57n ]

--

By: James Esses

Published: Apr 20, 2024

Society is, slowly but surely, beginning to wake up to the horrors caused in the name of gender ideology. Children have been harmed. Women have been erased. Free speech has been attacked. Reality has been undermined. 

Thankfully, the tide is starting to turn. The Secretary of State for Health, Victoria Atkins, made a landmark statement before Parliament. NHS England has halted the prescription of puberty blockers. Numerous sporting bodies have preserved fair competition for women. Many gender-critical litigants who suffered for speaking out have been vindicated in the Courts. 

However, we are not out of the woods yet. Not by a long way.

We still don’t understand why more young people than ever, particularly young girls and those who are same sex attracted, are presenting with a mental health condition causing them to believe they were born in the wrong body.

There are schools that continue to teach children that it is possible to change their sex. State and non-State institutions alike remain signed up to Stonewall’s biased schemes. Corporations continue to promote and glorify medical transitioning in their advertisements, in shameless pursuit of profit.

Therapeutic bodies continue to push a model of “unconditional affirmation” on clinicians. Private gender clinics continue to encourage vulnerable clients to transition. Those who raise concerns continue to be labelled as bigots and silenced, threatened or cancelled.

I know this only too well – I was expelled from my Masters’ degree in Psychotherapy and removed from my role as a counsellor at Childline – all because I expressed concern about child safeguarding.

Equally, there are those out there who seek to keep us shackled to gender ideology. We witnessed this through the number of NHS clinics which withheld material from the ground-breaking Cass Review. Schools are even being advised by activist groups to ignore the government guidance for children questioning their gender within schools. Clearly, guidance and reviews are simply not enough. 

That is why I, along with over 130 prominent signatories, have written to the Prime Minister, demanding a public inquiry into the failure of societal institutions to safeguard children from harm. An inquiry that considers these issues holistically is the only answer to an ideology that has managed to infiltrate an entire society. Crucially, a statutory public inquiry will be able to legally compel evidence and make concrete recommendations to ensure real change is brought about.

This letter has been signed by parliamentarians, clinicians, therapists, lawyers, social workers, detransitioners, academics, journalists, campaigners, and commentators.

Reading the full letter, you may be surprised by some of the names who, under normal circumstances, have nothing in common with one another. Our letter has signatures from across the political spectrum, including Conservatives, Labour, Reform, Green, Social Democratic Party and Alba. That is because this issue is not about left or right. It is about right and wrong.

The stakes could not be higher. Children and young people have been left scarred, emotionally and physically, in the name of gender ideology. Some have been left infertile. Others have lost parts of their bodies that they can never get back. 

As a society, we have failed in our duty of care towards children. We must secure justice for those who have been harmed. Crucially, we must ensure that no child again suffers the same fate.

Rishi – If you are reading this. Please do the right thing and set up a public inquiry as a matter of urgency. Our children’s wellbeing depends on it. 

[ Via: https://archive.today/TZGoL ]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Benjamin Ryan

Published: Apr 18, 2024

On April 9, the long-awaited Cass Review detonated in England. Its effects have been felt around a world torn asunder by the politicized subject of gender. The 388-page report, which was supported in part by six independent systematic literature reviews that were published by the BMJ, scrutinized the science behind pediatric gender-transition treatment.

Cass found that the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors was based on “remarkably weak evidence.”

In the report’s fallout, furious clouds of misinformation have formed, fueled by people who doubtfully have read much—or any—of the report or the BMJ papers. These people have falsely claimed that Cass only accepted randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, as evidence to consider in her massive report.

I write this article as the same lone warrior who battled monkeypox misinformation (and made a typo doing it) two years ago. I write in hopes of setting the record straight on a few key points. I write as a dismayed middle-aged man who remains, at his heart, the same frustrated child who always did the reading before class, and who was forced to sit and listen to those who hadn’t done their homework dominate the discussion.

The following is a distillation of various fact-checking tweet threads I’ve published regarding the Cass Review. Individual tweets are hyperlinked throughout the text if you would care to refer to, comment upon, or retweet them.

To learn about the specifics of the Cass Review, you can check out my coverage in The New York Sun, my tweet thread about that article, and my thread about the report.

This particular article will be devoted to the dying art of fact checking.

Here’s What’s At Stake

Many advocates of gender-distressed young people are furious that systematic literature reviews, they argue, set the evidentiary bar too high. They say these reviews forbid the acceptance of lots of promising findings from perfectly good studies on pediatric gender-transition treatment.

Others say those evidence-based-medicine standards of assessing the strength versus weaknesses of research are vital to prevent research that makes erroneous claims from impacting health policy and sending it astray.

They note that the stakes are high when it comes to pediatric gender-transition treatment, in particular considering the drugs in question may impact fertility and sexual function. Fertility, they say, is a human right. And since children cannot consent to their own care, the adults responsible for their care—parents or guardians and doctors—need to be especially sure before they consent to or provide drugs that could take a child’s fertility.

Here’s the question: Where does the pediatric gender-dysphoria care field go from here, now that Cass has said the evidence is weak and uncertain (as have multiple previous systematic literature reviews)? Should it accept the claim of GLAAD, the LGBTQ media watchdog group, that the “science is settled,” and that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones should be widely provided to gender-distressed children?

Or should the pediatric gender-medicine field follow the lead of Cass and England, and of Scandinavian nations, re-classifying pediatric gender-transition treatment as experimental and, accordingly, restricting it to clinical trials only Then, if the results of those clinical trials are favorable, it is possible that those European nations will change course again and broaden access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors? Perhaps then they would be satisfied that the evidence is strong enough?

Here in the US, we have a split-screen system, quite unlike the European nations:

23 red states have passed bans of pediatric access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender distress. Many are tied up in the courts. The Supreme Court will almost surely settle the matter.

Blue states support liberal access to such medications.

The major US medical societies, in particular the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society, along with the medical/activist group WPATH, all support liberal access to pediatric gender-transition treatment. This is in stark contrast to Cass/England’s approach.

So wide is the gulf between Cass and WPATH that after Cass supported forbidding puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors, WPATH said that the majority of gender-dysphoric adolescents would fare better on such medications than with the holistic mental-health care Cass advises and that is now policy in England.

At stake here is the question of how scientific research is translated into health policy.

Who gets to decide, and what methods do they use to assess the research?

What is the best way to do this, to ensure that the best possible care is provided to vulnerable young people?

The most important question is this: How can patients, families and healthcare and mental-health providers be provided the most robust and informative information possible to guide their shared decision-making as they weigh the risks versus benefits of treatment?

Cass says that WPATH’s guidelines are weak. WPATH countered in their recent statement by asserting that they, WPATH, are the subject-matter experts on pediatric gender-transition treatment, not Cass. The American Academy of Pediatrics, meanwhile, has been sued, along with the author of its 2018 policy statement backing pediatric gender-transition treatment and the overall “affirmative” model of care, in a medical-malpractice suit that I covered for The New York Sun.

False Claims Have Widely Circulated That Cass Rejected all Non-Randomized Controlled Trials

Cass does indeed state that randomized-controlled trials are the gold-standard of scientific studies. Meanwhile, many claim that an RCT for gender-transition treatment would be unethical to conduct among children, because the preponderance of evidence indicates the treatment is safe and effective. (Others vigorously dispute that such a trial would be unethical and that such evidence is trustworthy—hence, they say, the need for an RCT.) Furthermore, it is not possible to blind such a study, because the effects of the drugs (i.e., suppressed puberty or cross-sex puberty) are too obvious.

However, neither of the two systematic literature reviews on which Cass was partially based—one about puberty blockers, the other about cross-sex hormones to treat gender distress in minors—place RCTs as the bar that the 103 studies they assessed needed to meet. Rather, they used a validated assessment tool known as the Newcastle-Ottowa scale, which is designed to assess the strength of observational studies.

This is how one of the papers described the scale:

Neither of the studies deemed high quality by the reviews were RCTs.

And so, the widespread claims that the Cass Review set an impossibly high bar to reach by demanding only RCTs, discarding 101 out of 103 studies of pediatric gender-transition treatment, are: FALSE

Let’s examine how Dr. Hilary Cass and her team did factor in the systematic literature reviews about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

One systematic literature review examined puberty-blockers for gender distressed kids. It examined 50 studies, and included in its synthesis one high-quality study and 25 moderate-quality studies. It did not simply ignore the 24 low-quality studies.

The other systematic lit review examined cross-sex hormone use for gender distress in minors. It examined 53 studies, and included in its synthesis one high-quality study and 33 moderate-quality studies. But it did not simply ignore the 19 low-quality ones.

What about the Cass Review? How did it make use of the two systematic lit reviews? The claim that Cass simply discarded the 101 moderate/low-quality studies and only looked at the two high-quality studies is: FALSE

She folded the analyses of the 103 studies into her report.

Let’s zoom in to the 388-page Cass review. To see where she first folds in the findings of the systematic literature review of cross-sex hormones, go to page 183. Here is how she introduces that paper:

Cass includes in her report the following chart from the lit-review paper on cross-sex hormones, which breaks down all the studies it analyzed and what outcomes they addressed. Cass is pointing out key areas where more research is needed, in particular about fertility outcomes. So you can see that this report is about way more than just the narrow question of treatment efficacy. It’s about the whole field of pediatric gender medicine and the research apparatus behind it.

On page 184 of the Cass Review, she goes into considerable detail about the findings of the systematic literature review about cross-sex hormones. She does not solely focus on the one high-quality study, although she does certainly highlight it. She refers to all 53 studies.

The review discusses the findings of the systematic literature review on cross-sex hormones for minors amid discussions of lots of other individual papers about pediatric gender-transition treatment. The review also folds in the findings from the systematic literature review about puberty blockers for gender distressed minors (p. 175).

Cass includes the following chart from the review paper on puberty blockers for gender-distressed kids, which breaks down the outcomes examined by the 50 studies. It points to areas where much more research is needed, especially about…fertility.

From page 176 to 177, Cass has lots to say about the specifics of the puberty blocker systematic literature review. She does not restrict her discussion to the one high-quality study included in the review.

The Review includes 15 pages of footnotes of studies, guidelines, and other sources on which the report is based. The report is not solely based on two studies.

In sum, those who say Cass and the lit reviewers simply discarded 101 studies are incorrect. However, because the quality of the study findings was overwhelmingly weak, Cass was indeed very limited in which studies she could rely on in assessing safety and efficacy in particular.

Cass sums up the matter as follows in her introduction:

Who Has Made False Claims That The Cass Report Rejected All Non-RCTs?

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation published an article quoting doctors repeating, and failing to challenge, the false claim that the Cass Review disregarded any studies about pediatric gender-transition treatment that were not randomized controlled trials. The article made various other false or misleading claims, such as that puberty blockers are at least believed to be safe and reversible. Sallie Baxendale’s recent scholarship, along with Cass’s findings, have shown how neither of those claims are known to be true. Much more research is needed.

Continuing a running theme in our culture of late, hundreds of academics have signed a letter protesting the Cass Review that strongly suggests they have not read the review or the systematic literature reviews on which it is partly based. Their letter falsely claims the Cass Review “does not include a proper systematic literature review since it disregards most research evidence because it fails to reach the impossibly high bar of a double-blind trial.”

The letter was spearheaded by transfeminist sociologist Natacha Kennedy and her colleagues at the Feminist Gender Equality Network.

Numerous accounts on X (formerly Twitter) broadcast the false claim that the Cass Review and two of the systematic literature reviews on which it was based simply discarded 101 of 103 studies on pediatric gender-transition treatment. This includes the British singer Billy Bragg, Dr. David Gorski (who also falsely claimed that Cass referred to so-called rapid-onset gender dysphoria in her report) and activist Substacker Erin Reed:

In her most recent Substack published April 18, Erin Reed continued to further the falsehood that Cass “disregarded” all but high-quality studies. She also made false or misleading claims about: the subjectivity of the systematic literature review’s scoring system; the ongoing debate over whether gender dysphoria is influenced by social contagion; the false notion that the Cass Review aligned itself with an anti-trans propagandist; and the detransition rate.

In a lengthy YouTube video, British political activist and pundit Owen Jones (who once interviewed me about monkeypox when I was very swollen and bald from chemo) repeatedly made the false assertion that the Cass Review excluded all non-RCTs.

Jones also falsely claimed that none of England’s pediatric-gender-clinic patients were sped through the assessment process. The Cass Review shows that at a minimum, hundreds of children were referred to endocrinology after no more than four assessment appointments.

Jones also repeatedly said that the rate of detransitioning—people who after taking cross-sex hormones stop the medications and revert to identifying as their biological sex—is about 1 percent, saying that long-term studies show this. This despite the fact that Cass said in her report that because of a lack of long-term follow-up, the detransition rate is unknown.

How Did All This Misinformation Get Started?

From what I can estimate, the first person to have pushed the false claim that Cass simply discarded 98 percent of the available studies about pediatric gender-transition treatment was trans activist and attorney Alejandra Caraballo.

The key problem is that Caraballo cited the wrong systematic literature reviews in a viral tweet about the Cass Review.

Five hours before the Cass Review was published on April 9, Caraballo tweeted a screenshot of what appeared to be the new systematic literature reviews that would be published alongside the Cass report. But these screenshots were actually from the so-called NICE reviews—from 2020.

The tweet quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views and has 850K to date.

The NICE reviews of the pediatric use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender distress relied on the GRADE system, which with rare exceptions only gives high-quality ratings to randomized controlled trials.

Caraballo apparently did not yet have a copy of the final Cass Review report at this time. If Caraballo had waited until the new systematic literature reviews on which it was partly based, Caraballo would have seen that they did not throw out all but RCTs.

I am quite certain Caraballo did not have access to the Cass Review’s final report before the embargo lifted (at 7:01pm ET April 9), because shortly before the embargo was set to lift, Caraballo tweeted what was quite apparently thought to be the Cass report. But the link was to the review papers, not the report. As you can see, I told Caraballo on April 9 that the tweet had not, as claimed, linked to the Cass Review:

And of course amid all this, uber-popular debunking podcaster Michael Hobbes, who once hosted a show called You’re Wrong About, weighed in.

This reminds me of the time Hobbes hate tweeted about the feature in The Atlantic that I wrote about carpal tunnel syndrome and spent half the summer researching. He dismissed it with a wave of the hand. It was obvious he had not read it.

I will leave you, dear reader, with one small, yet mighty request:

PLEASE DO THE READING.

--

About the Author

Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. He has contributed to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun. Ryan has also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, Thomson Reuters Foundation, New York, The Marshall Project, PBS, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, the New York Post, Money, Men's Journal, City & State, Quartz, Out and The Advocate. 

Learn more about Ryan’s work on his website, and follow him on X @benryanwriter.

==

Make no mistake, these gender fanatics aren't mistaken or misinformed or confused. This is malicious and deliberate. They're liars and they know they're lying.

How do we know? They don't say things like, "ah, that makes sense now," or "I didn't realize that," or "I misunderstood that."

Instead, they pivot, and then they pivot, and then they pivot again. They create one lie, then another, then another, then another.

"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." -- Brandolini's Law

It's not criticism or analysis. They're anti-science religious fundamentalists doing the same kind of thing anti-evolution creationists do: strawman, misrepresent, misinterpret or outright lie in order to create a false sense of doubt or uncertainty. It's religious apologists producing propaganda for the faithful.

--

Note: Even Stonewall has had to backpedal, which they've done while pretending how the research was evaluated was "unclear." Community Notes has pointed out that dedicated sections in the report itself explain exactly how this was done.

Meaning, Stonewall was either lying about having read it, or they read it but were lying about what's in it. It's most likely they didn't read it and simply took the word of one or more of the already named frauds and activists LARPing as "journalists."

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The New York Times never puts Myanmar on their front page.

🤔

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

A new type of cybercrime, primarily targeting teenage boys, is sweeping across the social mediaverse, and has already silently claimed dozens of lives.

‘Sextortion’ is a new type of cybercrime that uses fake profiles to lure a target into sending explicit photos of themselves, and then uses these photos, alongside threats, to blackmail and extort money from the victim.

It is not about the sexual gratification of the predator, nor are these the actions of disgruntled former partners. This is purely about money, and getting as much of it from the target as possible.

Worse, unlike other types of cyber crime, where other demographics are targeted; sextortion does not need a long runway for the scammer to build trust, it can take hours, or even minutes, to get what they want.

So what makes teen boys uniquely vulnerable?

Well, boys have not been subject to the same awareness campaigns as girls, who are taught to be mindful of what they send, and to whom. Instead, boys’ fast and loose approach to sending explicit photos of their body, and the unique shame they feel when exposed, is what makes them an easy and lucrative target.

So who will speak to, educate and protect our boys?

How many more lives will have to be devastated, and lost, before we take the same meaningful action taken to help girls, to support boys too?

Is it time we talked about sextortion?

Is it time we protected our boys?

What do you think?

-

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Arrest. Expel. Where applicable, revoke citizenship/student visas and deport.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

This is how it started.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The idea that a father does not have an attachment to his child, a fundamental intense, profound relationship with his child, is very difficult to swallow. And we now know that obviously this is not true.

But the attachment relationships a child builds with its mother and father are different. They are just as intense and just as profound and just as influential. But they are different.

So, when we look at a mum's attachment relationship is very much based on nurture and it's quite an exclusive relationship, so it's very much between the two, between the mother and child, and they're very much turned in on each other. So, it's an inward looking relationship, okay? And it's all about that security, that nurturing security.

When we look at dads, that is also based on nurture. So there's very much a nurturing element there. But there is an additional element and this is really critical to the dad's role. Because as well as nurture, there is an element of what we call challenge. So rather than it being an exclusive relationship, inward looking, what we see with fathers is they go, I love you, I nurture you, I am your secure foundation, but now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn you around and go, there's the world, and you need to learn how to deal with it.

--

"The most reliable predictor for gang activity and youth violence is neither social class nor race or education but fatherlessness." -- John Sowers

"It is no exaggeration to say that fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the engine driving our most urgent social problems". -- David Blankenhorn

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Paul Garcia-Ryan

Published: Apr 18, 2024

Paul Garcia-Ryan is the board president of Therapy First.

A comprehensive review commissioned by England’s National Health Service, released last week, found that gender transition medical treatment for children and young people has been built on “shaky foundations,” with “remarkably weak” evidence. The independent study — led by physician Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health — incorporates multiple systematic reviews “to provide the best available collation of published evidence,” as well as interviews with clinicians, parents and young people, in reaching its conclusions.

Referring to young people who have already been treated under these dubious circumstances, such as those at the Tavistock Centre’s now-closed Gender Identity Development Service, Cass wrote, “They deserve very much better.”

In the wake of the Cass Review’s release — which has rocked the British medical and media establishment, and might soon reverberate in the United States — many are asking how we got here. How did clinicians come to recommend the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to thousands of children and adolescents when there was insufficient evidence that these treatments were safe and effective?

Part of the reason is that “the toxicity of the debate is exceptional,” as Cass notes in her foreword: “There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour. This must stop.”

I know all too well how the absence of good-faith, healthy debate on this subject can affect clinicians and patients. When I was 15, a therapist affirmed my conviction that I was born in the wrong body. After more than a decade of hormonal and surgical interventions, I detransitioned at age 30. I had come to realize that my transition was motivated by my difficulty reconciling with being gay. Today, I am a licensed clinical social worker and board president of Therapy First, formerly the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association, a nonprofit organization that advocates psychotherapy as a first-line treatment for youth gender dysphoria.

Usually in psychotherapy, treatment approaches are refined and improved by vigorous discussion, research and dissemination of new information. When it comes to youth gender treatments, though, professionals who raise concerns have been censored and subjected to reputational damage, threats to their license and doxing. As a result, countless gender nonconforming young people have been badly served.

Therapy First has been the target of silencing and intimidation efforts. Now with a professional membership of more than 300 clinicians based in 36 states and 14 countries, we are joined in our concern regarding the quality of mental health care provided to gender dysphoric youth. Even though the organization is apolitical and non-religious, with many of our members being LGBT, we have been falsely linked to the religious right. Despite being strongly opposed to conversion therapy, or trying to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, we have been accused of practicing it.

What I’ve learned is that therapists who cite the poor quality of evidence in support of medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria, or who advocate traditional principles of psychotherapy in this area, are likely to be vilified — sometimes by fellow clinicians. Last week alone, eight complaints were filed against one of our members’ licenses by other therapists for simply posting, on a professional Listserv, the link to one of our organization’s webinars, on trauma-informed mind-body practices.

An activist website has labeled our therapists as part of the “global anti-transgender movement” and listed details from their personal lives, including the names of their children and other family members. Last month in London, the Telegraph reported, a medical conference that explored evidence and heard from seasoned therapists and doctors regarding the treatment of gender dysphoria was interrupted by masked protesters who set off a smoke bomb and attempted to force their way into the building.

In addition to worrying about activists outside the consulting room, therapists apparently must now also be concerned about whether their patients are wielding hidden cameras. This month, an undercover video recording of a therapy session was posted online, presenting the clinician as a practitioner of conversion therapy, yet the would-be video sting merely revealed a clinician engaged in normal therapeutic exploration. In the current climate, any therapeutic response other than immediate affirmation is considered transphobic.

It isn’t right that professionals must risk their livelihood and reputation to help young people struggling with gender dysphoria. If the culture of bullying persists, I fear that fewer clinicians with a developmental approach will be inclined to keep working with this population. These young people will be left with clinicians who aren’t following the science, many with good intentions, but others who might behave more like activists than mental health professionals.

The Cass Review made clear that the evidence supporting medical interventions in youth gender dysphoria is utterly insufficient, and that alternative approaches, such as psychotherapy, need to be encouraged. Only then will gender-questioning youth be able to get the help they need to navigate their distress.

[ Via: https://archive.today/83ZJa ]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"There is only one solution."

This is how the Nazis got started the first time.

It's happening again.